DIFFERENCE A
fter driving the all-new Range Rover Sport earlier this year, we came away deeply impressed with it. So we’re familiar enough with it to know, broadly, how good it is.
And we know that there’s really only one rival worth bringing — the best alternative, the only one that might give the Sport a shoeing, given half a chance. It’s Porsche’s Cayenne Turbo, a fairly handy old thing if ever there was one.
Their respective specifications? Similar in some parts, very different in others.
Both have a V8 engine, blown in the ways alluded to in their titles. The Sport displaces 5.0 litres, the Cayenne 4.8, but they make the same amount of power, or thereabouts of some 500hp. Both have an eight-speed automatic gearbox, too. But from there, the technical specifications diverge a touch.
This Range Rover Sport has a lowratio transfer box that drops the gear ratios by nearly three, for ultra-low-speed off-roading. The Cayenne does without one. And while the Cayenne has a steel monocoque, the Sport follows Jaguar Land Rover’s recent expensive-car trend of getting an aluminium monocoque, riveted and bonded, with no spot welds.
Aluminium’s lower-than-steel density has given Land Rover something to shout about, but does it give an overall weight advantage?
Range Rover claims that the Supercharged Sport’s kerb weight is from 2,310kg. Porsche says the Cayenne Turbo’s is 2,170kg. The Porsche is an unimportant 4mm shorter, but 56mm wider and 78mm lower. Each is amply big in the front, rear and boot.
And it might not be the narrower width that makes the Range Rover easier to place in traffic. More likely, it’s a combination of two things: first, the higher driving position, and second, by the flatter, squarer bonnet and easily sighted sides.
In other words, the Range Rover lets you see what you’re doing. You feel elevated, because you are. It makes for an airy interior, too, which Land Rover has sought to enhance.
Porsche? It reckons that you’re not bothered. The door card even sweeps up a touch towards the A-pillar, seeking to enhance a flight-deck feel accentuated by a tall centre console.
And there — in the treatment of the door tops in two cars — you have it: a neat encapsulation of the two different approaches. The Range Rover Sport, relaxed, airy, with that big central touch sensitive screen, reducing the button count by 50% over its predecessor, complemented by fully digital dials.
It contrasts in the Porsche. We’ve liked the Cayenne’s interior treatment thus far, but there’s no question: the Porsche’s is a busier cabin.
Both the Cayenne and Sport are supplied with a mechanical equipment list of pretty monstrous proportion, but the Range Rover has a more delicate way of dealing with the array.
The touchscreen does most things — and does them well — while the Terrain Response system is handled by a dial that pushes neatly into the console.
The Porsche, meanwhile, has separate buttons for nearly everything it does, despite a touchscreen, and crams five dials behind the steering wheel.
There is, in short, more going on in the Cayenne. And although its material finish is excellent, the Range Rover Sport feels more special.
On the road, there’s more going on in the Cayenne, too. Its ride — at least, on the optional 21-inch wheels of our test car — is busy on poor surfaces. It shimmies and skips, seldom settling, even if you slip the standard air springs into Comfort mode.
Do you get used to the Cayenne’s ride? You do. Driven in isolation, in fact, it passes into the background pretty quickly, we found. It’s just that, when compared with the Range Rover Sport — itself also with optional 21-inch wheels — the difference is marked. The Sport has an ease to the way that it moves and